Random thoughts, emotional outpourings and soul-searching expositions on the world or as Douglas Adams puts it - analyzing deeper, existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe :-)

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February 12, 2007

That little black box hidden behind layers and layers of sane, white in your head and mine, waiting for the right time to spill its black outside…Do you know what lies in that black box?

Fear.

Cold, dark fear.

Not the kind that you confess to friends and perhaps even laugh about, not the kind that dances for a few uneasy seconds in your mind and drifts away just as easily, but the kind that has an unnerving, churning, wringing grip on your stomach, the kind that fills your mouth with a bitterness that won’t go away no matter how hard you swallow, the kind that nudges you awake from deep sleep and you realize you are sweating and you are scared to open your mouth because you don’t know if you can cry for help…

That kind of fear.

Fear that some of us, the lucky ones, feel only in the middle of the night - when it’s too late to be called night but too dark to see light, when time does not exist and night blends into day.

The unlucky ones? They feel it even in the middle of the day, for a few seconds when the birds seems to have stopped mid-song, when even dogs don’t bark, the walls suddenly close in on them, without warning and then they feel...fear. Just them and the creatures of their imaginations (or perhaps a reality so aberrant, they (we) don’t, can’t even acknowledge its true nature?) – the ugly, putrid, misshapen gnomes, luring them into the dark caves of their own selves, filled with evil thoughts and terrifying accidents, ghosts of the past, secrets that have been entertained but hidden and locked away. But no-one, not you or me can stay lucky for long. Can we? Sooner or later, the dark world of our fears catch up with us, a race with a predetermined result. We still run the race, hoping to outrun the black cloud of our own imprisoned feelings, the what-ifs and hushed thoughts hiding behind the screens of our defenses and then one day, we can no longer run, we can only wait for the cloud to descend, to weaken, to break our spirits…

Perhaps you hear it (if you listen closely) when you are under water, when your feet can no longer touch the bottom, and your face is hidden away from light, when you are in another world, a blue world with the dulcet sounds of water. One moment you see the bubbles in front of you, you are laughing and floating at ease.

And the next moment, perhaps you closed your eyes for a second of rest and everything changes - the sounds die down in a whoosh and it’s as if, the bright blue world turns a nasty, inky black, the warm water turns frigid – the hackles in your neck stand up, your arms and legs flail desperately and then drop down flaccid. You stop struggling because a voice whispers, “Hush now! There is only one way to go!”, until you no longer see the bubbles or the blue, but only feel an uncomfortable creeping sensation...as the swirling black vortex swallows you…down, down, down.

Cold, alone, scared.

That kind of fear.

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Blame this little snippet on Lisey's story (not for the weak-hearted) or my little swimming accident. Fear is universal. Real fear lurks just under the surface in all of us, waiting, waiting...have you ever felt real fear?